Families on the land - mothers, fathers, children, all living beneath the exultant and demanding skies of the northern Great Plains - these are the people who populate Larry Woiwode's works and who have helped secure his celebrated place in contemporary American writing. The stories collected here in Silent Passengers - spare, intense, tender - display his widely acknowledged talents to the greatest effect. Although he is known chiefly for his novels, Larry Woiwode's. Short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and other periodicals since the sixties, has been included in four editions of Best American Short Stories (the most recent being "Silent Passengers," the title story of this collection), and has received the Aga Khan Literary Prize from The Paris Review; and in 1990 his Neumiller Stories received the Southern Review/LSU Award for Short Fiction, the citation for which reads (in part): "The constancy of Woiwode's concerns. Through twenty-five years of storytelling is a sign of his fiction's depth. His characters endure death, birth, illness and the instability of love ... His style is dazzling and quiet at once; like a highly efficient engine, his language has the power to lift you very high before you know it. This careful plainness is the opposite of glltz: his work is solid and perfectly finished and sometimes so heartbreaking only its beauty could persuade you to endure its pain." The. Truth of this commendation is confirmed - beyond any doubt - in Silent Passengers.